Vuoden Huiput 2010

With Vuoden Huiput (The Best of the Year in Finnish advertising and design) we wanted to experiment with the in many ways unpredictable nature of crowdsourcing and automated workflow. Together with a programmer Juhani Pelli we created an application that transformed any written word or sentence into a rebus, an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. In English, a rebus often uses homonyms, as seen in the classic IBM logo consisting of a picture of an eye, a picture of a bee and the letter M. However, homonyms are rare in Finnish language, therefore the rebus is constructed from a list of some 5000 words with the most used syllables and matched with an image search result from Google. This "Rebus-machine" was published as a web service through witch any message could be encrypted and sent by email or shared in social media.